La filologia dell'opera italiana fra testo ed evento

The paper discusses the guidelines on which current critical editions of operatic music are based, with particular reference to the nineteenth-century Italian opera. The basic principle, gradually acquired by decades of experimentation, is that the sources, rather than documenting the transmission of a text given once and for all, record the traces of a series of performative events that have occurred in the historical life of the work, even beyond the will of the authors. Operatic editions should account for this temporal dimension, and at the same time offer a text that can be used in today’s theatrical practice; lacking this requirement, the economic sustainability of such editorial enterprises will
fail. These criteria are illustrated with the example of the edition, in progress but already employed for performance, of the fi rst opera of Vincenzo Bellini, Adelson e Salvini (1825).